


to the table I step alone

by saltstreets



Category: Football RPF
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-23
Updated: 2015-07-23
Packaged: 2018-04-10 21:05:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4407620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saltstreets/pseuds/saltstreets
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What do you want?</p>
            </blockquote>





	to the table I step alone

**Author's Note:**

> On my feet I stand tonight   
>  Stand and step up to the light   
>  An extraordinary man   
>  Unbroken in a breaking light
> 
>  
> 
> Forever after days  
> Stand and make myself a crown  
> To the table I step alone  
> Hold my own above the ground 
> 
>  
> 
> Take my shot under the light  
> Heroes come the common way  
> Pull myself into the sky  
> Wrap me in the banner I made  
> -The National, _Forever After Days_  
> 

The phone is ringing and Iker considers ignoring it. But then he makes the mistake of half-glancing at the screen to see who it is, and then he can’t ignore it. Some things you have to bow to. No sense in putting off the inevitable.

 

 

 

Sergio calls Iker because in less than sixteen hours he’s going to be on a plane headed halfway across the globe and his captain is going to be staring down the barrels of a hundred flashing cameras as he says goodbye to the club he’s called home for the past quarter of a century.

He calls Iker because even though amidst the ugly fog of rumour and speculation Sergio knows what’s going on, he still needs to hear Iker say it. Say it to him alone before he has to drag it up for the public to gnaw on.

 

The line picks up. Iker doesn’t say anything so Sergio starts. He usually does. “So it’s true.” He says it as a statement rather than a question, the inflection neutral, but he knows Iker can hear the words underneath, the small voice whispering, _please tell me it’s not true._

“It’s true.”

Of course it’s true. Sergio knows how to read people and he knows how to read Iker best of all. This is the last time that the rumour mill will grind out this particular line. Iker Casillas is leaving Real Madrid.

“There’s been nothing official said as of yet, unless I’ve even been cut out of the loop of my own transfer,” Iker says, voice light but mirthless. “How’d you find out?”

“I just knew,” Sergio tells him, not quite matching Iker’s casual tone. “I just knew.” He sounds wrecked and he can tell it. He shouldn’t be this winded, hearing Iker confirm what he’s been aware was in the works for months but he can’t help it. It had always seemed so unreal, like a promised storm on a cloudless day. Not that the past season could be called _cloudless_. Perhaps it was more accurate to say that he’d been stubbornly ignoring the blackening sky, telling himself the winds would blow it all over his head.

And now he was caught in a downpour.

“Sergio, I-”

“Stop.” Sergio cuts him off, voice stronger now. “I don’t want- I don’t _need_ to hear it, okay? Out of everyone I’m the last person that needs to hear anything.”

 _It’s true,_ Iker had said and Sergio had been heartbroken but was quickly burning into anger, and not the explosive sort of anger that erupted from him on the pitch upon occasion (or, okay, maybe more than just _upon occasion_ but still) but something a bit more like embers at the bottom of a fire, smouldering and ashen and long-burning, the kind that stayed glowing red-hot long after the flames had died down. “I’m not looking for anything from you Iker, I don’t want answers from you, you’re not the one who needs to give me answers.”

“There’s going to be a press conference tomorrow.” Iker laughs shortly. “Perfect timing, hm? Everybody nice and safe on the plane and no one there but the journalists to pick at the bones. Very clean. Efficient.”

Sergio clenches his hand around the phone so tightly the screen is in danger of cracking. “We should be there. There should be a big send-off at the Bernabeu and we should all be there with you. _I_ should be there, and also at the press conference, I can’t believe-”

“It doesn’t matter,” Iker tells him dully. “I don’t care. I don’t want a send-off, I don’t want anything.” The underlying _I don’t want to leave_ is there, unspoken but tolling as a bell in Sergio’s skull, clear and terrible.

“But I should _be there._ I’m your-” _teammate, friend, someone who believes in you wholeheartedly-_ “I’m your vice-captain. I should be there.” He repeats, unable to say anything else to fully encompass the yawning horror he feels at the idea of Iker, alone at the last, saying his farewells without a steadying hand at his back, without his teammates behind him as he’s been behind them for all these years. “I hate this, Iker,” Sergio says even though he knows it sounds childish. “I hate that tomorrow I’m going to be on a plane to Australia and you’re going to be walking the goddamn plank. I hate that there’s nothing I can do.”

There’s a pause before Iker makes his last request. “Come over.” He says the words so quietly that Sergio almost thinks he’s imagined them. “You can- could you come over?”

And Sergio’s been over Iker’s place many times before, but this time Iker doesn’t extend the invitation in a tone that implies beers on the couch until they both fall asleep on opposite ends, feet squashed together and without enough space to avoid sore necks in the morning but nonetheless content in each other’s company. The question has none of the typical assumptions: the idle conversation, the casual drinking, the easy and familiar. It’s a tone that implies something quite different, something Sergio had never heard from Iker (although it would be a lie to say he hadn’t imagined such a situation where he might) but he recognises it. He recognises it as a buzzing under his skin and the loom of an imminent future lighting Sergio up with the kind of courage usually reserved for the bottom of a shot glass.

He doesn’t even have to think about his answer.

 

 

 

Iker sits on the sofa. Sara is upstairs, gone to bed after kissing him and telling him to turn off the lights before he went to sleep. She was so serene in her phrasing that Iker could have cried. She always knew what he was doing, thinking. Most of the time she knew better than he did himself. At least he wouldn’t be alone in Portugal.

That had been the first thing she’d said to him when the spectre of the transfer had been beginning to gain reality, _of course Martin and I are coming with you. Was this ever even a question?_

And Iker had looked at her and known that it never had been.

 

So now he sits on the sofa and waits. It seemed he’d been doing a lot of that lately: waiting for other people to come along so he could ride in their slipstream for a while. Drafting until they passed by and he was left waiting again.

 

 

 

Iker opens the door with a hesitant smile.

“Why d’you look as if you half expected me not to show up?” Sergio demands, pushing for louder and brighter than he feels. “Do you not trust me or something?”

Iker rolls his eyes but his smile loses its brittle edge. In the end it’s just these small things. There’s nothing Sergio can do that will mean anything, not anymore, but he can do this.

 

“I didn’t understand Raul, back then,” Iker says quietly and Sergio knows he’s thinking of those horrible days back five years ago (and was it really already five years?) when they’d watched helplessly as their captain and vice-captain were shown the door. They’re sitting on the back porch, the night gathering quietly in the corners of the evening as the time ticks away. Sergio has to be on a plane in less than fourteen hours. “when he said he felt broken up. I thought I did. I thought I could get at what he was feeling.” Iker laughs. “I had no fucking clue.”

Sergio remembers. He also remembers Guti’s eyes, later on a different evening, all hollowed and void of their usual light. Him saying, cryptic at the time, _would you rather be set ablaze in your own home or kicked to the street with the door locked behind you?_

 

He’d told Iker later what Guti had said, and it had been posed as a rhetorical question rather than as an invitation to philosophical debate, judging from the mostly empty bottle Guti’d been tapping a fingernail against as he’d twisted in his chair and spat this final testimony out into the still air of his apartment. But now Sergio wonders if Iker has an answer to it after all.

 

 

 

Iker feels somehow insubstantial, as if he is on the verge and in danger of losing tangibility and floating away. His anchors are being cut away one by one. He has to hold on to what he can, for as long as he can.

 

 

 

They’ve made their way through a bottle of wine with the addition of an assortment of fancy liquors that Iker had produced from a cabinet and Sergio has to be on a plane in less than twelve hours when Iker finally leans forward, and Sergio is relieved to find that he hadn’t been imagining the voice Iker had used over the phone.

The kiss is small and feather-light before Iker is swaying back, eyes worried and Sergio takes a minute to wonder at it all before he’s pushing his way back into Iker’s space and kissing him again, not hesitant and apologetic but certain and determined, the way he should have been kissing him for years, really. Iker’s eyes widen slightly as if in surprise (but he couldn’t honestly be _surprised_ , Sergio spares a moment to think wryly) before closing again and he sinks into the kiss with relief, pulling Sergio inward and closer, fingers twisting into the front of his shirt.

Sergio had kissed Iker hundreds of times before: drunk, sober, happy, sad, teary-eyed most certainly, when it was just the two of them and when it was in front of the Bernabeu and the world (there was a joke somewhere in that about the two being one and the same, but at the moment it was less of a joke and more of an exile of Iker far from his stadium, his world. The saint, excommunicated) but he had never kissed Iker in way of an ending before. His kisses had been brushed against Iker’s cheek and forehead in small promises. Promises indicated a future. Now he was writing his goodbyes against the skin, dragging them out in desperate, curling script.

It wasn’t really an end, Sergio told himself fiercely, letting his hands spread along Iker’s waist, fingers playing at the hem of his shirt. It could be worse. Iker wasn’t even leaving the goddamn peninsula, much less the continent. 600 kilometres away and in the arms of a club that would treat him a ways better than Madrid had been as of late. And they would still see each other during call-ups. There were still promises to make, to keep.

 

 

 

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. I want to. I’ve- and I trust you. I want to give you something and I want to take something before you leave.”

Iker nods, his hands still on Sergio’s hips, not directing but asking.

“What do _you_ want, Iker?” Sergio near-whispers. It’s a stupid question. They both know what Iker wants. They both know what Iker needs. What horizon he’s been sailing towards for the past twenty-five years, all weight and white on his shoulders, on his back. Iker wants and needs something he can’t have. Not anymore.

There are no words that can adequately describe what Iker wants. But maybe there’s something else, something smaller that he can have. Something that still belongs to him. So. “I don’t know,” Iker tells Sergio. “I don’t know what I want.” He meets Sergio’s eyes. “But. Tell me. You always know. Tell me what I want.”

“Okay,” Sergio says. And he reaches out, his fingertips burning against Iker’s collarbone, to tell Iker what it is he wants in the best way he knows how.

 

 

 

 

Sergio has to be on a plane in less than ten hours.

 

 

 

 

“You were right. But what I didn’t want was for it to have to be this way.”

“I know.”

**Author's Note:**

> the whole sequence of official confirmation to press conference to the Bernabeu thing is sorta hazy in my mind, blurred together in a terrible weekend of my brain screaming WHY WHY GOD IS DEAD WHY and fire alarms going off in my head so all I really know is it happened in that order and somewhere in there Real Madrid flew to Australia and somewhere before that, this fic takes place. Do not attempt to figure out how all the hours fit in. They do not.
> 
> this fic is also about a week later and 80% more melodramatic than I intended, oops


End file.
